Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Read Free Book Online Page B

did not have an anarchic temperament. The letters he exchanged with James Strachey spoke freely about gay intrigues and sentiments, yet Rupert always denied the sexual union that James longed for so abjectly. Still,Rupert was entirely at home in the gay world of Cambridge; he required only that it be kept hidden from the realm of respectable heterosexuality.
    One of Rupert’s gay inclinations was his need to be taken under the wing of an admiring older man. When he arrived at King’s in October 1906 his rooms were across the hall from a famous local character, the snobbish aesthete and Apostle Oscar Browning. Dismissed from Eton on suspicion of moral turpitude, Browning had returned to be a fellow of King’s, where he had been an undergraduate. But his fin-de-siècle affectations were too much for Rupert to take, so instead he found a replacement for St John Lucas in Charles Sayle, who wrote Uranian poems and novels and worked at the university library. 3 Sayle had gone to Rugby, where he had had a sentimental friendship with J.H. Badley (the future headmaster of Bedales). He went on to Oxford, but was sent down for some kind of sexual misconduct. Small, fussy, and spinsterish, his nickname was “Aunt Snayle.” Bertrand Russell called him “a well known ass.” Now forty-two, he had a little house at 8 Trumpington Street where he entertained a stream of students and fell tremulously in love with the prettiest ones. “I do not know if these undergraduates love me,” he wrote in his diary, “but I know that they love me to love them!” 4 He was also a pedophile, swooning over working-class boys whom he called “Angels of Earth.”
    During his first two years at Cambridge, Rupert was a constant visitor to Sayle’s house, sometimes staying overnight. Geoffrey Keynes and the climber George Mallory were often there with him. Their intimacy was of a kind that has long vanished, and today it appears both touching and preposterous. As with St John Lucas, Rupert was drawn to an older man who could give him domestic tenderness and sympathy. He must have known that Sayle was infatuated with him, but almost certainly there was no sexual contact between them. In later years Rupert kept quiet about the friendship with Sayle, realising how pathetic his way of life might appear to an outsider. Sayle had no such second thoughts. “I do not know in what language to moderate my appreciation of this great man,” he wrote in his diary, “great in his ideals, great in his imagination, great in his charm. The world will learn to know him later on. It has been mine to know him now.” 5 Before dismissing this as mere gush, we should remember that it was exactly how most of Britain would judge Rupert in his posthumous heyday.
    An invitation to Trumpington Street was not hard to come by. The “Cambridge Conversazione Society” or “The Apostles” was far more exclusive, but in both cases long blond hair and a pretty face made it easier to gain admission. When Rupert was infatuated at school with Michael Sadler or Charlie Lascelles, he was older than them and the one who set the terms of the relationship. With the Society, Rupert was in the junior position. He was now the object of desire, and had to decide if he wanted to satisfy the passion that he aroused in older or less physically attractive men. He set a pattern of toying with his suitors’ emotions but never responding with equal love or desire. The one who most persistently and most vainly desired him was his Hillbrow schoolmate James Strachey. James had not gone on to Rugby but to St Paul’s School in London, first as a boarder and then as a day boy. He renewed a correspondence with Rupert in the summer of 1905, when James was preparing to enter Trinity College. They were the same age, but James went to university a year before Rupert. In September Rupert accepted an invitation to visit the Strachey